BUS572- Blog #4

Google Display Network and AdWords

Concept #1- Topics Targeting 

      One of the most important concepts that I learned this week is called "Topics Targeting". Topics Targeting allows you to place your AdWords ads on website pages that pertain to a certain topic. This allows your ad or ads to be displayed on the entire Display Network on pages that have certain content related to your topic. For example, if you have a vintage automobile business you can enable your ads to appear on any other type of web page that is related to automobiles, which could be motorcycles, SUVs, or sports cars. This can be extremely helpful because there are many potential customers out there that are interested in a variety of different automobiles. For instance, my neighbor owns a variety of motorcycles, but he also likes to collect vintage cars. If your business sold vintage automobiles, you could enable topic targeting on your website and have ads all over different automotive websites and forums. My neighbor could be looking to buy a new motorcycle on a certain website, but if you had topic targeting enabled, he might just see your ad pop up on one the motorcycle site he was looking at, therefore, possibly clicking on your vintage car ad. For more information about Topics Targeting click here. I understand the concept of Topic Targeting and its importance, but I'm still confused about how you would go about paying for this type of advertising. If you're already paying for an AdWords campaign, do you have to pay another fee to enable topic targeting? Or is it just another feature that you can use for free with AdWords?

Concept #2- Remarketing    

Source: http://www.adsmartonline.com/blog

      Another important concept that I learned during this session was remarketing. This concept allows you to reach out to users who have already visited your website. You can show them certain messages whether it be text, search display, or even offline media and advertise to users who have already visited your site, but did not purchase or convert on any of your products or services. Your business could create a remarketing list, save individuals who visited your "most popular page", and create a new AdWords campaign that is specifically designated for these users who have already visited your page. For example, say your business sold baseball equipment and you had a user on your site looking at baseball bats. This user didn't end up buying a baseball bat from your site, but continued exploring the web in search of a better deal or this user was just searching any other websites in general. Your business could then send this user a personalized message in an ad form, which could say something like "Save 20% off any new baseball bat within the next 24 hours". This could, in turn, grab the user's attention and the user might re-visit the website and make a purchase because of the online coupon he/she had just received while browsing another site. I believe that this marketing tactic is extremely important because I visit many different websites daily looking for items and I rarely ever make a purchase. If I were to see an ad about a site that I had previously visited and it had a coupon attached to the ad, I might reconsider visiting that site and end up making a purchase because of the coupon they had offered. This could also drastically increase a business's conversion rate and increase their ROI if they had an AdWords campaign in place. This tactic is obviously very useful, but I feel like this technique can also be very invading as well. What if businesses' started overloading internet users with remarketing ads, making the search for a product/service unbearable?  

Skill- Keyword Planner

      The biggest skill I've mastered this session would be using the Keyword Planner. The Keyword Planner is basically a workshop in which new and existing AdWords customers can build upon and edit their search network campaigns. There are a variety of features the Keyword Planner has to offer, such as, researching keywords, getting traffic estimates, and historical statistics. It also gives you suggestions on potentially new keywords that one may use in their AdWords campaign. For example, once our group had our Ad Groups established in the Keyword Planner, we found information about the average number of clicks, impressions, click-through-rates, etc that our campaign will received based off of historical statistics. I believe that this tool is extremely important because you can even figure out the average cost of each individual keyword (which we did in assignment #3). While doing our keyword price analysis, we even added in a few extra keywords because the planner tool had suggested that we use them. If this Keyword Planner wasn't in existence, we would have never come up with those extra keywords that it recommended for us. I believe this can be extremely beneficial for companies that are having a hard time developing keywords for their different online advertising campaigns. Although I'm finally able to navigate through the Keyword Planner, I think that the user interface is extremely confusing.  What if companies tried to use the Keyword Planner tool without any guided assistance like our class had? Do you think that most people would just give up trying to figure out how to use this critical tool?

Personal Learning Journey    

      This class is still one of the most confusing and challenging classes I've ever had to take here at Chatham. I'm finally feeling more comfortable with AdWords, but our campaign hasn't even started yet so that makes me a little nervous. I still can't seem to figure out how to get the $250 deposited into our account either. I'm excited for the competition to begin and I'm really interested in seeing how well our team does in the competition compared with other teams. I believe that we have a solid campaign and I think that our client will be very pleased once they see their ads up and running. We've just received feedback from our client as well and they are already thrilled with our campaign thus far, but we still need to make a few minor revisions. In the next session, I hope to learn more about the opportunities tool in AdWords so that our team can manipulate our ads throughout the challenge and gain a maximum ROI for our client.

Sources:

GOMC Digital Marketing Course: Display Advertising: Topic Targeting

GOMC Digital Marketing Course: Display Advertising: Remarketing 

 https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2999770?hl=en
 

BUS572- Blog #3

SEO: Emerging Trends and Display Advertising

Concept #1: Emerging Trends in SEO

       

        One of the most important concepts I learned from chapter six was the new emerging trends in Search Engine Optimization. I'm going to talk about localization and personalization. Localization is the practice of creating a local version of a specific Web site. By localizing, the search engine presents certain information in the geographic context and language of the user. For example, I just typed in "baseball" into my Google web browser. On the very first page, it show me a few different links about the Pittsburgh Pirates and on the right side of the results page, it showed me a map of where PNC Park is located in Pittsburgh. Search results are now being personalized to what a search engine thinks the user is actually interested in and this is called Personalization. Search engines do this by gathering information that you have searched for in the past, gathering information about your age, and they can gather information based on gender types. For example, I use Facebook on a daily basis and instead of going through the hassle of of typing in "www.facebook.com", I simply type in the letter "F" into the Google browser and the first organic search result I get is Facebook's web page and then I click on that link to bring me to Facebook.  It may not be that big of a deal to some people, but Google has allowed me to become even more lazy when I want to get onto Facebook by tailoring my search results to what I look up most. I believe that this is an extremely useful tool that will continue to grow because many surveys have suggested that people are in favor of personalization/localization and they are willing to trade personal information in order to get a more customized search result. However, I am concerned about the future of this tactic. What if people start giving search engines too much of their personal information. Will this make it easier for people to steal another individual's personal information and use it against them by stealing their credit cards or committing other fraud?

Concept #2: Display Advertising

         Another concept that I thought was very important was Display Advertising. Display Advertising is a form of online media that contains photos, text, or other logos. In today's world, Display Advertising is user friendly, rich, and engaging. There are four main types of Display Advertising which are: Banner, Video, Rich Media, and Sponsorship.  For example, a video ad would be what you see before you start to watch a video on YouTube.com. These are called "Pre-Roll" video ads because they are shown before you are able to watch the media clip of your choice and are usually just a few seconds long. This increases user engagement and will sometimes even entice the user to click on the video ad if they are interested in whatever the video ad is displaying. I believe that this type of advertising is extremely important for businesses and advertising agencies because the user must first watch the video ad before they can watch their video clip of choice. This is a great way to catch the user's attention because the video ad is playing right in the user's face and not off to the side like some other PPC ads. They are also very interactive, which might spark the user's interest as well. Personally, I cannot stand these ads, but I understand why advertisers make such ads. However, what if these ads begin to become longer and longer? Do you think that this will cause some users to stray away from sites, such as, YouTube and cause them look for their media on other sites that do not have these types of "Pre-Roll" video ads?

Skill- Ad Scheduling

       Ad Scheduling helps you control when you run your campaigns. Here is some more information about Ad Scheduling. There is basic mode in which you can control the days and different times you want your ad to be shown. Advanced mode will allow you to set bid multipliers for your ads, which can range from 10-1000% for different times of the day and week. For example, you see that your ads get the best results between 5pm-8pm.  During those hours, you can set a higher bid by using the bid multiplier tool and hopefully you'll achieve a higher traffic and conversion rate because of the higher bid. I believe that learning how to do Ad Scheduling will definitely helps our team with the GOMC. Up to this point, my team discussed that we were going to run our AdWords campaign for the full 21 days (all day), but now I believe that we should do some experimenting first to see, which time of the day is our ad is being shown the most. However, what if this bid multiplier tool puts us over our budget very quickly? I see the benefit in using this tool, but I also see it spending too much of our $250 budget. I'm wondering if this tool will  be more beneficial or detrimental for our campaign? 

Personal Learning Experience   

       So far this semester has been extremely challenging and overwhelming. My team is still having a lot of trouble trying to use Google AdWords and it's very frustrating. I think that the book does a great job of explaining the concepts and the videos help as well. In my opinion, I think that we should be in the computer lab more actually practicing with these Google AdWords tools instead of just listening to guest speakers. I believe that this would help myself and the rest of my classmates out tremendously because it would be some real hands-on experience. Hopefully, my teammates and I start to get a better grasp on these concepts soon so that we can be successful in this course.

Sources:

Stokes, R. (2011). emarketing: The essential guide to digital marketing. (V 1.0 ed.). Quirk Education. Retrieved from http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/reader/19

  

https://www.google.com/partners/#p_content;idtf=lQQAAAAAAACVhM;

https://www.google.com/partners/#p_content;idtf=rQQAAAAAAACthM;